I. The General Character of Parties

Swedish experience highlights the simple logic of political science that popular electoral democracy calls for a clear line of undivided responsibility reaching from the policy-initiating executive branch of government through a thoroughly representative and deliberative legislature to the great body of voters. Contrariwise, Swedish experience seems to refute certain notions about the “parliamentary-majority” basis for judging of “strong government” in a democracy as these expressions often have been interpreted from the experience of Britain, France, and the United States. From both the positive and negative points of view, Swedish institutions merit examination, especially since they have successfully endured severe tests. The Swedish political system came through the prewar depression years with an enviable record, and, despite enormous international pressures and the accompanying domestic anxieties, it is surviving the war years with a consistent policy of its own, without sacrificing free and regular elections. Sweden provides, therefore, an excellent laboratory for testing principles of democracy, of representation, and of party government.

In the first part of this paper, an attempt was made to outline the frame of ideas which guided the founders of the national budget system, and to review the principal factors which have influenced the institutional development of the Bureau of the Budget since its establishment in 1921. The second part aims to give some account of the Bureau's current responsibilities and activities, including its working relationships with Congress and the various agencies of the executive branch.

Perhaps the greatest merit of the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921 must be found in the stress it laid on the connection between budgeting and executive management. By directing the Bureau of the Budget to “correlate” the estimates of the federal agencies, the law linked fiscal planning with the coördinative responsibilities of the President. Correlation of estimates necessarily involves adjustment—not only of financial demands for different agency programs, but also of organizational form and mode of operations. Such adjustment cannot be decreed blindly. It requires administrative study and analysis. The Budget and Accounting Act rendered this inference explicit by designating the Bureau of the Budget to look into the structural and managerial problems of the executive branch as a continuing assignment. Up to 1939, the designation remained for the most part a mere notice of intent.

Since the English Revolution of 1688, it has been a part of the Anglo-American tradition that elected representative assemblies control the policies and acts of the executive branch of the government. This doctrine was firmly embedded in the American state and federal constitutions. With some wartime reservations, it has been universally accepted throughout our country. At the present time, however, there is an uneasy feeling that practice does not square with theory. There is even a suspicion that practice contradicts theory—that a vast body of officials has in fact escaped the possibility of control by the people's representatives.

The trends of the last half-century have certainly complicated the problem of congressional authority over administration. This has occurred in part because administration has made impressive gains in effective organization and operation, while relatively Congress has stood still. Within the administrative system there has developed a capacity for self-direction which might well challenge the dominance of Congress, if Congress continues to be the laggard partner in the governmental team.

As we are moving into the terminal phase of World War II, it is inevitable—and entirely proper—that we allow our thoughts to wander ahead in an initial exploration of the matters on our national postwar agenda. Many of these matters relate to ends and center on policy alternatives. Others focus primarily on means and involve questions of approach. The latter include problems of governmental structure and machinery within the framework of our political system. Such problems present themselves in both the legislative and executive departments. With respect to the executive branch, we must seek to evolve an appropriate organizational form that will enable the federal government to sustain effectively an economy of high-level production and employment. In this effort we are confronted in part with a task of constructive innovation, in part with the need for reëxamination of prewar working hypotheses and wartime experience. It would be a promising venture to return to the work of the President's Committee on Administrative Management and appraise its proposals in the light of later developments. In any such enterprise, attention must doubtless be given to one conception closely associated with the recommendations of the President's Committee: that of the Executive Office of the President.

Prior to Pearl Harbor, few Americans had given any serious and sustained thought to rationing as a form of wartime economic control. The United States was felt to be a land of chronic surplus in which rationing had no place. To be sure, certain industrial raw materials had become scarce under the impact of the defense program early in 1941, and had been subjected to priorities control by the Office of Production Management. But rationing of consumers' goods was not taken very seriously. Mr. Ickes' East Coast gasoline “shortage” of the late summer and early fall of 1941 had evaporated quickly. There were, of course, a few bright young men in the back rooms of Leon Henderson's O.P.A. who knew that strict wartime price control of consumers' goods would eventually necessitate rationing, price increases not being permitted to control distribution of relatively scarce goods. But even in the O.P.A. the immediate pressure of other duties, principally the control of prices of basic raw materials and the preparation of a price control act then being considered by Congress, prevented the creation of any real rationing organization. Pearl Harbor found the United States with no rationing plans, no rationing organization, and no real appreciation of the indispensability of rationing in a genuine all-out war effort.

The principal, indeed the desperate, task of democracy is to maintain itself; its second, to improve and refine itself. It is well to conceive our problem in practical terms, as it tends to sharpen and limit the inquiry; and, in a sense, part of the answer, at least, lies in the terms in which the question is posed. The problem is not an exercise in theory, but is urgently practical. So is the answer. But as all political science teaches, though it may come in institutional and psychological devices, in the background, promising and perhaps mocking, there is also the metaphysical element. And the last is inescapable. For this question needs solution: What Marxism is to Soviet Communism, and what Racialism is to the Nazi State, is X to Democracy. What is X?

For we cannot assume that uncultivated men and women, unshaped by their institutions that already exist, or without a doctrine, can operate the democratic form of government. If that were so, nobody would have thought of education. If the instinctive response of mankind to its social problems were democracy, or ineluctably something else, the political scientist could happily surrender his Ph.D. and close his college doors.

Fully as interesting as the provisions of the proposed new constitution that will be submitted to the voters of Georgia at a special election on August 7, 1945, is the method by which the document was framed. The constitution of the state now in force, adopted in 1877 soon after the state was freed from carpet-bag rule, is a long and complicated document, filled with detailed limitations on the government, particularly in the field of finance. As a result of the inclusion of numerous provisions statutory in nature, the document has been amended three hundred and one times in a period of sixty-eight years. Recognizing the need for a new constitution, the Institute of Public Affairs of the University of Georgia drew up A Proposed Constitution for Georgia in 1931. This document proposed a thorough revision of the structure of the government, including such radical changes as the substitution of 30 districts for the existing 161 counties as the basis of representation in the General Assembly. The widespread publicity given the document served to stimulate interest in constitutional revision, and most of the press of the state, notably the Atlanta Journal, has in recent years actively supported the movement.

In March, 1943, the General Assembly passed a resolution, sponsored by Governor Ellis Arnall, providing for a commission of twenty-three members to revise the constitution. The commission was to be composed of the governor, the president of the senate, the speaker of the house of representatives, three members of the senate appointed by the president, five members of the house appointed by the speaker, a justice of the supreme court designated by the court, a judge of the court of appeals designated by the court, the attorney general, the state auditor, two judges of the superior courts, three practicing attorneys-at-law, and three laymen to be appointed by the governor. The resolution provided that the report of this commission should be submitted to the General Assembly either in the form of proposed amendments to the constitution or as a proposed new constitution, to be acted upon by the General Assembly and submitted to the people for ratification or rejection.

“Right without Might is weakness,” wrote Blaise Pascal three centuries ago. But “Might without Right is tyranny. We must therefore combine Right and Might, making what is Right mighty and what is mighty Right.” To achieve such a combination in the community of nations is, by common consent, the major problem of world politics in our time. Outside of the dwindling ranks of the anarchists, few would any longer dispute the propositions that peace among men is unattainable without the organization of men into government, possessed of effective power to enforce law, and that justice among men is unattainable without the subordination of government itself to law, reflecting men's conception of right. How these goals are to be reached among nations is still a matter of controversy. But after participating in two world wars against tyrants, dedicated to world unity through conquest, most Americans are now agreed that peace and justice among nations depend upon order and law among nations and that these, in turn, depend upon the efficacy of what has long been called “international organization” or, more optimistically, “international government.”

The Great Debate of 1944–45, like that of 1919–20, is not over ends, but over means. How can an effective world organization be brought into being, and how can it be made to function for the maintenance of peace, the enforcement of law, and the achievement of justice? In an age whose slogan in grappling with its most fateful problems has too often been “too little and too late,” it is not strange that American discussion of the problem of world order has largely taken the form of old disputes as to the terms upon which the United States should assume membership in an association or league of nations to keep the peace. The tacit assumption behind the discussion is that such a partnership of sovereignties can and will keep peace, enforce law, and promote justice if only it be organized with sufficient cleverness and joined by a sufficient number of states.

For courts of forty-eight states to interpret forty-nine detailed organic acts with an eye toward maintaining limited federal government amid centralizing total war and a distracting national election, challenges not only the statesmanship of performers, but the discrimination of reviewers.

Collectively, the major state court decisions in the third year of the war point toward a resurgence of judicial power, a reëmphasis upon the rights and the place of the states and upon the legislative as opposed to the executive branch, a new period of exceptional interest and fertility in the growth of constitutional doctrine.

War, paradoxically, has bolstered as well as undermined the creed of states' rights. The pattern that has emerged from the small but growing number of federalism cases reveals state courts no longer content to make a virtue of necessity. “Little OPA” acts and ordinances are generally upheld. But expanded federal controls exercised administratively in fields long reserved to the states meet steadily mounting opposition—especially if they are not obviously crucial to the war effort or to the stability of a war economy. Even actions taken under those provisions of the Price Control Act which were deliberately framed to safeguard federal administrators from state-court interference have suffered nullification. Since the date of the Yakus and Willingham decisions, statutory construction has supplanted constitutional law as the medium for resolving those personal and delicate questions of the state judges' own powers under the Price Control act.

The future government of Italy portends a challenge of enormous magnitude for the Catholic Church. Subject as it has been to periodic attacks for reactionism, the Church has been hard pressed to throw off the stigma of its association with Franco in Spain and its willingness to deal with Mussolini's Fascist régime. In the light of these accusations, coupled with rather widespread doubt whether church orthodoxy is compatible with political democracy, it seems altogether appropriate to examine the political theories of one of the leading exponents of liberal Catholicism—Don Luigi Sturzo.

A little over twenty years ago, foreign correspondents, eagerly seeking a label for the “mystery man of Italian politics,” referred to him as a clerical socialist. If the term “clerical socialism” is synonymous with Christian socialism, such a characterization might be a proper one for this Sicilian priest. Certainly Sturzo was a champion of the Christian socialist movement which urged the correction of economic injustices but decried the materialism of the Marxists. He approved of the Guild of St. Mathew's sympathy for the unionism and socialism of the nineties and the Roman Catholic Social Guild. The latter found its incentive in the papal encyclical Rerum Novarum and the “scholastic traditions in restraint of usury and economic injustice.” Both of these organizations were associated with Christian socialism. But, although Christian socialism and clerical socialism have occasionally been placed in the same category, the latter is too ambiguous a term to permit a precise classification.

Developments in rural local government during 1944 included little that was wholly novel. Few state legislatures were in regular session, and those which met gave rather less attention than usual to local governmental problems. Nevertheless, several significant statutes and constitutional amendments became effective, and the convention which framed a new constitution for Missouri took numerous steps toward the modernization of local government in that state. In addition, particular local units in various states took action under preëxisting legal authority to improve their governmental forms or practices. As is usually the case, some proposals in the direction of betterment were defeated.

I. Areas

A type of governmental area which is becoming increasingly popular is that for providing rural fire protection. Kentucky, in 1944, authorized the establishment of fire protection districts upon petition by fifty-one per cent of the registered voters of the territory proposed to be included. Like some other laws of its kind, the Kentucky statute provides that the governing boards of such districts may either operate fire departments or contract for receiving fire protection from municipalities or other fire protection districts.

The number of soil conservation districts continued to grow rapidly. As of December 15, 1944, 1,203 such districts, including approximately 3,107,451 farms, had been established in the 45 states having soil conservation district laws. Only the three New England states of Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire were without legislation authorizing the organization of districts of this nature.

The 1944 campaign was the second presidential election in which the ceilings of the Hatch Act were operative, and the first campaign in which contributions from labor organizations were prohibited. It furnishes convincing evidence of the ineffectiveness of these limitations and of the imperative need for complete revision of existing regulations of campaign funds.

The financing of the 1944 campaign was subjected to close study by special committees of both the House and Senate, and their hearings and reports supplement at many important points the reports required by the Corrupt Practices Act. The most controversial issues of the campaign centered about the Political Action Committee of the CIO, and this organization was subjected to close study by both committees. The House committee, headed by Representative Clinton P. Anderson (now Secretary of Agriculture), also stressed the increasing importance and questionable practices of non-party “opinion moulders,” but did not attempt to summarize the total expenditures of the campaign. Senator Green's committee, in addition to studying certain party committees and independent organizations in detail, made a great effort to compile complete data on receipts and expenditures affecting the presidential campaign, and its report makes available what is probably the most complete and accurate over-all picture of the financing of a presidential election ever recorded. The notable recommendations of this committee will be discussed later.

America has triumphed in the greatest war in all history, but we have yet to face the major enemy at home—unemployment and all the tragic waste and misery occasioned by it. By now it is hardly necessary to stress the grim fact that unemployment is a real threat. We have seen the first impact of demobilization and reconversion in many areas of the nation, especially in communities where aircraft and shipbuilding industries boomed in wartime. Some measures have been taken to cope with these short-run difficulties, and others are now under consideration. But the real danger lies beyond the present demobilization period. Fear has been creeping into the heart of all America—our returning soldiers, our war workers, our young graduates facing an uncertain future, our older and handicapped workers—a fear that relates to what will happen as things get back to “normal.” The dread lies in the word “normal.”

We know, of course, and we are constantly being reminded, that for a while one may expect activity of boom proportions—that those who have saved during the war will be purchasing the cars and radios and refrigerators that they have gone without for years, that agricultural and other exports to the devastated world abroad will be at a record peacetime high, that producers will be spending feverishly to restock inventories and replace worn-out capital equipment. However, these are temporary factors which will end all too soon. Nobody has forgotten that they quickly petered out after the last war. When backlogs at home and abroad have been filled, the postwar bubble will burst.

In certain sections of the daily press, and even in some scientific writings, one may find expressed fears that the United States faces a period of class struggle and revolutionary violence in which the Communist party will pay a prominent rôle. This is somewhat surprising in view of the fact that the Communist party of the USA has not engaged in revolutionary propaganda for the past eight years, and indeed abandoned the last slight remnant of revolutionary ideology in January, 1944. Nor does a Marxist revolution appear likely to arise from other sources. The only leftist groups that might with some accuracy be termed revolutionary, the two leading Trotskyite factions and the Revolutionary Workers League, the Socialist Labor party, the Proletarian party, and the Industrial Workers of the World, do little more today than engage in obscure polemics with one another. Their very names are unknown except to specialists. The Socialist party and its right wing splinter, the Social Democratic Federation, have long since abandoned revolutionary propaganda and confined themselves to reform within the present social structure. Thus at present no group that shows signs of growth is openly propagandizing for a Marxist revolution, and hence no promising focal point exists for an organized revolutionary movement based on the Marxist theory of the class struggle.

The reasons for the disappearance of Marxist revolutionary ideology, and the probabilities of its future recurrence in the United States, present a scientific problem that has received relatively little non-partisan investigation. As it is impossible to discuss in brief compass all of the factors that might lead to revolutionary disturbances, in this paper the analysis will be limited to the Communist party of the USA, as the most significant proponent of this point of view in recent times.

One of the most controversial legislative matters considered by the Seventy-eighth Congress was the question of whether or not Congress should simplify voting procedures for service men and women. The popular feeling of the nation strongly favored giving the armed forces every opportunity to vote, not inconsistent with the necessities of war. The controversy in Congress was not restricted entirely to the constitutional question of whether or not Congress had the legal power to provide soldiers with a federal ballot by which they could vote for president, vice-president, representatives, and senators, but in addition, it raised social and political questions of great magnitude. The political significance of the service vote became increasingly apparent when the Gallup Poll announced on December 4, 1943, that the soldier vote, which favored President Franklin D. Roosevelt by 61 per cent, could break the apparent even division of the electorate between the two parties and assure Roosevelt of reëlection. The social significance of liberal federal legislation on the issue was obvious, since numerous states have suffrage laws to prevent the practice of universal suffrage.

The current slump in the number of university students taking courses in public administration suggests that this is a good time to reflect on what form education for the public service should take after the war. It is highly probable that many university students will again undertake to prepare themselves for jobs and careers in government, despite an inevitable reduction in the number of federal employees. Educational assistance to veterans may, in fact, cause a large and sudden increase in the numbers attending colleges and universities with an eye to a government job after graduation. I should like to discuss the kind of education which should be offered such students after the war, whether or not they are veterans. My comments are directed primarily toward undergraduate instruction. The advanced work on administrative theory and problems carried on by graduate faculties and candidates for the Ph.D. is a separate subject.

Basically, the problem of education for the public service involves two questions. First, what are the most important demands which the public service makes upon the individual? Second, how can the universities contribute most to developing the qualities needed to meet these demands?

The demands which the public service makes upon the individual are many and varied. They cannot all be anticipated in advance; and if they could be, there would not be time in the university to give specific training for meeting all of them. Thus some determination must be made as to the kind of demands that are most important. Such a determination was, in fact, being made before the war by university faculties teaching public administration and political science. Students preparing for the public service were being asked to spend an increasing amount of time in the study of techniques, procedures, and skills currently in use in governmental practice. Most prominent among these were personnel management, budgetary and fiscal administration, accounting, statistics, government procurement practice, office management, and similar subjects.

There were no changes in the personnel of the Court during the 1943 term. Disagreement amongst the justices mounted sharply. In seventeen cases, four justices dissented; three dissented in twenty others. Two cases overruled previous decisions of the Court, bringing to twenty-four the total list of reversals since 1937. One of the two recent reversals, that in the very important case holding the insurance business to be interstate commerce, was effected by a minority of the justices, who divided four-to-three.

A. Questions of National Power

1. The war Power

Constitutionality of Wartime Price Control and Rationing. In a group of cases, the Court came to grips with the constitutionality and construction of the Emergency Price Control Act of 1942. The most important of these was Yakus v. United States, involving a conviction in a federal district court in Massachusetts for a violation of the maximum prices fixed by the O.P.A. on the sale of wholesale cuts of beef. Yakus refused to obey the price regulation, declined to follow the procedure made available in the statute for protesting against it, and attempted in his criminal trial to challenge the validity of the price regulations and of the statute on which they rested. This he was not permitted to do. Speaking through Chief Justice Stone, the Gourt held the Emergency Price Control Act to be valid, not only in its substantive regulations, but also in the procedures set up for its enforcement. The Court's opinion dealt with four points.

In recent discussions of the German problem there seems to be a growing superficiality and confusion that is greatly to be deplored. Sensational articles, and even books, on the subject are having a deep influence on American and British opinion. We badly need more informed discussions of basic parts of the German problem if we are to avoid serious mistakes in the postwar world. Although definitive answers cannot always be given in the political field, it is nevertheless incumbent upon everyone who has studied, both in the ivory tower and in the field, to offer as much light and leading within the spheres of his competence as time and strength will permit.

At this time, I think it is important to call attention to an aspect of the German problem which must not be overlooked after the war either by the occupying powers or by the German people. Since it is primarily a long-run problem, and not merely a problem of occupation, the German people will have to solve it in the final analysis. Furthermore, since I do not belong to the school of gloomy haters who envisage an indefinite oppression and control of the German people, I prefer to base a program of governmental and political regeneration for Germany on the assumption that the tragic and bitter experience of the Germans under Hitler will lead to a revival of those features of civilized, democratic society which are so essential to the proper functioning of both national and international government.

In two recent articles in this Review, the writers examined in some detail the January 15, 1944, reorganization of the Department of State, and discussed the problem of organizing our national government for effective participation in world affairs. The purpose of the present article is to point out the main effects of the further reorganization of the Department announced on December 20, 1944, by Secretary Stettinius.

At the outset, it should be repeated that it would be difficult to overemphasize the importance of these reorganizations for the conduct of our foreign affairs. For in spite of the importance of international organization to world order, we should never forget that the smooth functioning of the international machinery we set up and the success of the peace we establish will depend in large measure upon how effectively the various states organize their national governments to carry on the complicated relations of the international community.

During the past year, the Department concentrated its attention on putting into effect the reorganization of January 15, 1944. Committees for the consideration of top policy questions were set up. Departmental functions were regrouped and consolidated.

The Charter of the United Nations, signed at San Francisco on June 26, 1945, was the culmination of long and wide preparation. It is to be doubted whether any international instrument, or perhaps any human document, had ever before undergone such wide popular scrutiny, such intensive expert study, and such democratic procedure of adoption. It seems to be accepted, too, that in no country were preparatory studies undertaken upon so large a scale as in the United States.

At the Dumbarton Oaks conversations, each of the four states there represented offered the results of its studies in a plan submitted for consideration; and these, as the result of previous comparison of views, varied little in their fundamentals. The United States plan had been submitted to the three other Governments on July 18, 1944. Since it was in constitutional form and in more detail, it became the basis of further development, although all four plans were thoroughly discussed and parts of all were included in the final Proposals.